皇家华人

From the swimming habits of dead trout to the revelation that some mammals can breathe through their backsides, a group of leading leftfield scientists have been taking their bows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the 34th annual听听ceremony. Not to be confused with the actual Nobel prizes, the Ig Nobels recognise scientific discoveries that 鈥渕ake people laugh, then think鈥�.

[The Conversation] caught up with one of this year鈥檚 winners, Saul Justin Newman, a senior research fellow at the University College London Centre for Longitudinal Studies. His research finds that most of the claims about people living over 105 are wrong.

How did you find out about your award?

I picked up the phone after slogging through traffic and rain to a bloke from Cambridge in the UK. He told me about this prize and the first thing I thought of was the听听collected snot off of whales and the听. I said, 鈥渁bsolutely I want to be in this club鈥�.

What was the ceremony like?

The ceremony was wonderful. It鈥檚 a bit of fun in a big fancy hall. It鈥檚 like you take the most serious ceremony possible and make fun of every aspect of it.

But your work is actually incredibly serious?

I started getting interested in this topic when I听听补听听in Nature and Science about extreme ageing in the 2010s. In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don鈥檛 stack up. I鈥檝e tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can鈥檛 meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.

The epitome of this is blue zones, which are regions where people supposedly reach age 100 at a remarkable rate. For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They鈥檙e the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular听, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on.

Okinawa in Japan is one of these zones. There was a听听in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don鈥檛 register your death.

The Japanese government has run one of the听听in the world, dating back to 1975. From then until now, Okinawa has had the worst health in Japan. They鈥檝e eaten the least vegetables; they鈥檝e been extremely heavy drinkers.

What about other places?

The same goes for all the other blue zones. Eurostat keeps track of life expectancy in Sardinia, the Italian blue zone, and Ikaria in Greece. When the agency first听听in 1990, Sardinia had the 51st highest old-age life expectancy in Europe out of 128 regions, and Ikaria was 109th. It鈥檚 amazing the cognitive dissonance going on. With the Greeks,听听at least 72% of centenarians were dead, missing or essentially pension-fraud cases.

What do you think explains most of the faulty data?

It varies. In Okinawa, the best predictor of where the centenarians are is where the halls of records were bombed by the Americans during the war. That鈥檚 for two reasons. If the person dies, they stay on the books of some other national registry, which hasn鈥檛 confirmed their death. Or if they live, they go to an occupying government that doesn鈥檛 speak their language, works on a different calendar and screws up their age.

According to the Greek minister that hands out the pensions, over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time.听, some 30,000 鈥渓iving鈥� pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997.

Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there鈥檚 the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together. It鈥檚 closely followed by downtown Manchester, Liverpool and Hull.听听have the lowest frequency of 90-year-olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be an old person.

The oldest man in the world, John Tinniswood, supposedly aged 112, is from a very rough part of Liverpool. The easiest explanation is that someone has written down his age wrong at some point.

But most people don鈥檛 lose count of their age鈥�

You would be amazed. Looking at the听, even people in mid-life routinely don鈥檛 remember how old they are, or how old they were when they had their children. There are similar stats from the US.

What does this all mean for human longevity?

The question is so obscured by fraud and error and wishful thinking that we just do not know. The clear way out of this is to involve physicists to develop a measure of human age that doesn鈥檛 depend on documents. We can then use that to build metrics that help us measure human ages.

Longevity data are used for projections of future lifespans, and those are used to set everyone鈥檚 pension rate. You鈥檙e talking about trillions of dollars of pension money. If the data is junk then so are those projections. It also means we鈥檙e allocating the wrong amounts of money to plan hospitals to take care of old people in the future. Your insurance premiums are based on this stuff.

What鈥檚 your best guess about true human longevity?

Longevity is very likely tied to wealth. Rich people do lots of exercise, have low stress and eat well. I just put out听听analysing the last 72 years of UN data on mortality. The places consistently reaching 100 at the highest rates according to the UN are Thailand, Malawi, Western Sahara (which doesn鈥檛 have a government) and Puerto Rico, where birth certificates were cancelled completely as a legal document in 2010 because they were so full of pension fraud. This data is just rotten from the inside out.

Do you think the Ig Nobel will get your science taken more seriously?

I hope so. But even if not, at least the general public will laugh and think about it, even if the scientific community is still a bit prickly and defensive. If they don鈥檛 acknowledge their errors in my lifetime, I guess I鈥檒l just get someone to pretend I鈥檓 still alive until that changes.

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